Monday, July 8, 2013

It’s been a horrible week for the global aviation industry, following the tragic Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 accident at San Francisco Airport on Saturday, which resulted in the death of two passengers.

Although such incidents are often clouded by expert (and not-so-expert) theories about the cause, it will probably take months before federal investigators have a more accurate hypothesis.

Thanks to the cockpit voice recorder and “black box” flight data recorders, which were recovered from the wreckage, we already know that pilots attempted to abort the landing and start a ‘go around’ around 1.5 seconds before the aircraft crashed.

The Boeing 777’s black boxes have not indicated that the plane was experiencing any problems before the crash, and Asiana Airlines has stated that engine failure is unlikely to be the cause.

Asiana Airlines told the media that Lee Kang-Kook, the pilot in charge of landing the plane, had flown 9,700 hours in an Airbus A320. He was "transition training" to fly the Boeing 777 (having accumulated a total of 43 hours), and it was his first attempt to fly into San Francisco while manning a 777.

The aircraft was carrying 141 Chinese, 77 Koreans, 61 Americans, three passengers from India, one each from Japan and Vietnam and seven whose nationalities were unknown, the airline said.

Three of the four runways at SFO were open Sunday afternoon. Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) also completed their first day at the crash site yesterday, with some harrowing images posted on TWSB’s twitter account.

"You can see the devastation from the outside of the aircraft, the burn-through, the damage to the external fuselage. But what you can't see is the damage internally. That is really striking," said SB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman before the photos were released.

With these images, we now have our first peek inside the aircraft. I’ve included a couple on this page and the entire photo album has been uploaded on my Facebook page – click here to visit.

If this pilot was doing his IOE with only 43 hours under his belt, I hardly think that landing at SFO should have been attempted. While I'm not a pilot, I am from the bay area, married to a pilot and my father is a UAL retiree. I have also worked for Fed Ex and prior to 911 able to fly in the cockpit and I can tell you, flying into SFO is challenging. Especially if you're flying a 777 and not using auto land and landing on 28L which starts on the waters edge right? I think there will be a lot of tea and biscuit ass whipping meetings taking place from the top down to the Chief Pilot and Training Officers. As should be.

I've heard on my country's news that the pilot was not used yet with the 777 and made a too slow (for the height he was and he was very low) approach. They even decided to abort landing but they had just broken the barrier when the plane starts to stall... I've seen an amateur footage of that....

Transitions from one type of an aircraft to another are common. The general flight path to landing is similar on every aircraft. The 777 is designed to fly the course even on auto pilot and do a perfect auto landing. Just attributing the accident to the pilot is probably the easiest thing to do. This is not to say that there cannot be a human error but jumping to a conclusion is not fair. With the Flight Data Recorder the Investigation Team will be able to determine the entire chain of events leading to the accident; vested interests may divert the real cause.